The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

A woman steps over the line into the unthinkable in this brilliant, powerful, and unforgettable new novel by the author of The Lovely Bones and Lucky.

For years Helen Knightly has given her life to others: to her haunted mother, to her enigmatic father, to her husband and now grown children. When she finally crosses a terrible boundary, her life comes rushing in at her in a way she never could have imagined. Unfolding over the next twenty-four hours, this searing, fast-paced novel explores the complex ties between mothers and daughters, wives and lovers, the meaning of devotion, and the line between love and hate. It is a challenging, moving, gripping story, written with the fluidity and strength of voice that only Alice Sebold can bring to the page.

Alice Sebold is a graduate of Syracuse University, and she received her MFA at the University of California, Irvine. She has made her living as a teacher and has also written for The New York Times Magazine. She currently lives in southern California, where she is at work on her first novel.

The Guardian

The Almost Moon
by Alice Sebold
291pp, Picador, £16.99
The Almost Moon begins with a shameless grabber of a sentence - "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily" - and then doesn't let go of you until the book ends.

Entertainment Weekly

In chapter 1 of Alice Sebold's queasy and misguided second novel, The Almost Moon, middle-aged narrator Helen Knightly places bath towels over her elderly mother's face and pushes ''until I felt the tip of her nose snap and saw the muscles of her body go suddenly slack and knew that she had died....

The Bookbag

I have since read that the events of this novel are meant to take place over twenty four hours, but I still can't work that one out…… however I feel this is a novel I could return to, although I would approach it with a degree of dread.

USA Today

By the time Helen has had sex with her best friend's 30-year-old son, stripped down to model for an art class and plotted with her ex-husband to pin her mother's murder on a handyman, you'll be choking on your popcorn.Is there a literary prize for most cringe-worthy sentence in a single work of f...

San Francisco Chronicle

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Mysteries of the Mind: Researchers take aim at schizophrenia's thinking problems Restoration envisioned for Allegheny County courthouse High levels of stress at Carnegie Mellon decried Progress made on preserving blast furnaces, historic farmh...

Oprah.com

With gothic precision, Sebold takes us through 24 fraught hours in the life of Helen Knightly, a 49-year-old divorced mother of two grown daughters, who has spent her days in the shadow of her mother's mental illness, or as she puts it: "I had moved, married, had children, my own home, a job, but...